61–70 of 103 posts
Over the past couple of decades the percentage of young people getting degrees has swelled, we've been encouraging everyone to get a degree. Did we expect people to remain in low paying jobs when they can do something else? Those student loans payments aren't making themselves.
Why would they? You've spent the last 30 years telling them not to do those jobs, devaluing them with globalization and de-unionizing them to make sure those jobs don't create any kind of sustainable lifestyle for the people that do them. Someone on HN a while back gave some good advice: whenever you see "people won't do X job", append in your mind the qualifier "for Y underpaid salary/benefits package".
On point. You want people just give then good salaryies, benefits, and career growth.
3D printing construction tech should be a great way to offset this. Also great for space explorations.
These types of jobs eventually burn out your body. You used to be able to buy a house and grow a family on these wages, and eventually retire. With that no longer being the case, why would anyone with choice choose this option?
My dad did these jobs his whole life. He's in still in better shape than I've ever been and has a union pension better than anything any company has ever offered me. So.
No company in your industry has ever offered you anything like his union pension, because no companies in any industry (excepting maybe railroads?) offer anything like his union pension. They all stopped doing it some time between him and you.
The young people of today can't go back in time to when your dad was the same age. They have to take the jobs that are offered now. And the companies of now have worked very hard to bust the union influence of the past, so that they can offer crap pay and crap benefits, and shovel most of the risks of working the job onto the worker.
Young people are taking one look at that, and deciding to not even take one step down that career path. All this tells me is that young people are not as stupid as companies assumed them to be. The companies offering jobs that don't balance remuneration with worker risk then have to rely on workers with lower expectations, which is to say immigrants from countries with lower quality-of-life norms. They don't look at the work by judging the job in relation to other jobs in the US, but by comparing it to a similar job in their country of origin, and finding that it is X% better. Then the political scene changes, those workers start to dry up, and the companies are screwed--or, more accurately, hoist on their own petards.
The article mentions labor commuting from Sacramento to SF where the wages are higher, thus driving up prices in Sacramento due to lack of supply. That kind of domino effect eventually makes it so SF can't get labor because the labor has shifted to live 90' outside of Sacramento and commute there instead. At some point wages do have to go up, driving up costs further in a vicious cycle.
I don't know when but I believe another broad housing market collapse is coming.
So pay them more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a big reason why unions were created in the first place. Create safer working conditions, and make it possible for people who wear their bodies out can retire.
But what if I want to retire with a healthy body not a crippled one?
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Seems like $14.07. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Labore... Even "Construction Worker" doesn't bring it up much ($14.75), which means there's nothing in that career directly. https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Worker... The next step in that career is to be a manager or foreman. The Foreman only gets $22.36. ($38k/yr) https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Fore…
Depends on the market you're in and what you can do. > A crane operator in New York City earns $82.15 an hour in base pay and benefits, according to the Engineer News-Record, a trade publication. That's well's above the $66 an hour he would earn in Chicago or the $39 an hour in Washington, D.C. > But the real reason New York crane operators and other operating engineers earn such big salaries is overtime and benefits…
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There isnt a market for that: increased wages would increase house prices and the developer estimates he cant sell the house. If land were cheaper you would see rising wages.
If there isn't a market for it then there isn't a shortage of labor -- the correct equilibrium point has been found. And yet, they're claiming a shortage. They want to eat their cake and have it too.
The market doesn’t know what’s good for it. It’s only interest is the immediate short term.
Wow, the entire article doesn't mention once what the average wage for entry-level construction workers is. That's probably a huge part of the puzzle -- to omit that seems almost intentionally misleading, or at least bad journalism. Also, construction is a job that's notoriously hard on your body. You can't count on being able to do it into your 60s like office work, and one bad accident can end your career in constr…